Let’s Trash Books

Like finally being asked out by the cute boy at school and then finding out he has really bad breath and no personality, Life in the Boomer Lane has lately been disappointed by a couple best-selling books. These are works of fiction that have glowing recommendations from readers, and high marks from critics. LBL can no longer keep silent. She hereby presents them to you and explains why she didn’t agree with those readers and critics.

The AuschwitzEscape by Joel C Rosenberg Any book about Nazis, especially about the most notorious concentration camp run by the Nazis, sounds like it should be serious reading. And any book based on a real-life event, even more so. It garnered five stars on Amazon, with readers falling all over themselves to hurl accolades at it. According to Amazon, “Joel C. Rosenberg is a New York Times bestselling author with nearly three million copies sold among his eight novels.” This book was deemed “the best novel I’ve read all year” and “one of the explosive and chilling stories I’ve read.” The combination of reader and critic reviews and Rosenberg’s own track record made this book sound mighty promising.

It took LBL until the first sentence of the second paragraph in the book to think otherwise. Cut to an idyllic day in in 1940 in France, in a small town near the German border. Jean Luc, one of the book’s protagonists, was there for a happy gathering of his family to celebrate his neice’s fifth birthday. But Jean Luc was having a problem, and it was not indigestion. “He felt as though every molecule in his body were shaking.” LBL had to actually put the book down and consider what shaking molecules would feel like, but the closest she could come to it was in 1966 in the supply closet of the Atlantic City Chelsea Hotel children’s daycare room. Being unable to do so, she continued. “Evil was on the march and although everybody around him seemed bound and determined not to believe it, there was no question in his mind that the Nazis were coming for them, for the people of France…” Jean Luc was mighty perceptive, being the only person in France to be concerned about a Nazi threat.

But Jean Luc doubts himself. “Not that anyone was listening to him. Who was he, anyway, to know what fate lay in store for his country? He was just a kid, really, twenty-eight years old…of average height and average build with sandy blond hair and bluish-green eyes set behind gold wire rim glasses…”

Not even Nancy Drew had such self-doubt. That paragraph, alone, was enough to have LBL stop reading. Let’s bypass the fact that Rosenberg feels that describing what Jean Luc looks like is somehow important to a historical novel about war and atrocity. This was 1940, not 2014. Twenty-eight year olds in 1940 were full-fledged adults. Few of them were pursuing graduate degrees and living in their parents’ basements. Fewer still were frequenting bars at happy hour. Jean Luc is twenty-eight, married and a minister. Pretty strong creds to have whatever opinions he had, no matter what color his hair and eyes were. And she won’t even address herself to the fact that in that same paragraph we are told that his wife was “adorable,” although, thankfully, her hair and eye color were omitted.

Within minutes of Jean Luc’s profound observation of a Nazi threat, followed by his own self-doubt, Nazi planes appeared right on schedule. Bombs rained down. Buildings immediately started exploding. Body parts were flying through the air. Everyone quickly fell into a state of profound disarray. Jean Luc’s physical state went beyond molecule vibration and came perilously close to catatonia. This is clearly a step up (or down, as the case may be) from vibrating molecules. One would think all was lost, but since most protagonists don’t lose their lives within the first chapter of a book, LBL was afraid this one wouldn’t either.

Jean Luc recovers well from vibrating molecules and complete internal meltdown. He hurls his family into a car and drives the streets of the town against traffic, in a scene worthy of the finest automobile-infused thriller. In the final paragraph of the first chapter, Jean Luc has not only safely gotten his family to the main road leading out-of-town by choosing a route no one had known about, he has figured out a way to avoid the complete log-jam of fleeing Frenchmen. He jumps the center guard rail and drives away from town in the now completely empty incoming lane. By the end of the paragraph I felt as though I had just watched every Tom Cruise movie ever made. I was clear that no Nazi on the planet would be a match for Jean Luc and his vibrating molecules, and so it became completely unnecessary for me to read the remainder of the 468 pages.

LBL’s recommendation: Escape from The Auschwitz Escape.

The Fever by Megan Abbott, an Amazon “Best Book of the Month June 2014” garnered 3.5 stars. According to Amazon, “The panic unleashed by a mysterious contagion threatens the bonds of family and community in a seemingly idyllic suburban community.”

LBL is a sucker for contagion, every big green juicy blob of it. She has devoured books about plagues past, present, and future hypothetical. The problem with this book was that this “contagion” only affected one girl. The others were obviously hysterics. Abbott did her best to make ordinary settings and events seem sinister, sort of like reading about a group of teenage girls shopping in the local mall and noticing that the Auntie Annie pretzel vendor was staring malevolently at them while she dispensed their orders, followed by the down escalator not working.

This is not to downplay the current belief among some that inoculations are the spawn of the devil, but the state-mandated HPV vaccine administered to female teens at the school just never felt like it would be discovered to be the root of all evil. And the algae-ridden pond on the edge of town, clearly a health hazard, never seemed to harbor the slimy evil that Abbott clearly wanted the reader to believe it did. It was just a dirty pond, in spite of Abbott’s endless scenes describing people sneaking into it and leaving with mouths filled with slimy black matter and ensuing nightmares. LBL felt really sorry for the town citizens, not that their swimming hole was toxic, but that they obviously had no better way to amuse themselves.

The final way to creep out the reader was to have one of the teen girls take to You Tube, warning anyone with internet access that this sickness was “bigger than all of them” and would consume them all. That was enough to get CNN involved. It must have been a slow day for news coming out of the Middle East.

Try as Abbott might, it just seemed like a stretch. By the end of the story, we had the same one victim (now recovered), the girl who gave her poison confess and be arrested, and the rest of the teens deemed victims of mass hysteria.

The message: Unrequited love can be a bitch, especially when you are one.

Renee, it is a bitch when a touted book disappoints. I read a lot, but I also have several books where I started them and could not finish them. They just did not strike my fancy early enough. It disappoints me to have such high hopes dashed. Same thing happens with movies. Have a great week. BTG

I am often disappointed by books that have received good reviews. Sometimes I think that our standards have been lowered and either we don’t expect much or we no longer know what quality is. I’ve been watching The Roosevelts series on PBS and marvel at how eloquent the spoken and written word seemed to have been in that era. My molecules shake at the thought of what we have lost.

SO much more fun. I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read (well-regarded books) that are fine to read and have some merit, but leave me feeling like “Oh, OK, so that’s finished now.” But, ah, the great ones. They give such joy to life.

I think it would be hard for me to find enough decent novels I’ve read that were published within the last 30 years, to count them on one hand. The writing “rules” that the traditional publishing industry keeps accusing Indie authors of violating, are a case of “do as we say, not as we do.” There’s drivel and dreck on both sides of the publishing divide: nobody stands out. That’s why I decided to write in utter ignorance of the “rules,” and become The Best Bad Writer in the West. 🙂

Good comments. So much of what has been written and published in the last 30 years is based less on writing that has merit than it it the sure thing. What are the “rules?” I’ve never heard of that. But I have read some contemporary books that continue to resonate with me. They keep me from going into a total tailspin.

Most of the publishing industry’s writing rules have to do with stylistic preference on the part of individual gatekeepers. They promote what they think should be the trendy thing to read, which, for years, has usually been low-literacy, low-artistry, high-prurience and high-profanity. That’s why your observation about lacking merit but being a sure thing, is spot on.

Writing gurus condemn the kind of books you described, but writers who know somebody who works in the industry are the ones who attract agents and get publishing contracts, no matter how badly they write. The publishers then arrange their own sock-puppet reviews, to prime the pump on the reading public’s purse.

The gurus also like to pen articles of the “how to write a bestseller” ilk, and the book I wrote as an Indie, without knowing any of the “rules,” checks off all the boxes of one such article, but is it a bestseller? Nope. The only things that put a book on the national lists, are the effort and expense its publisher puts into aggressively promoting it. (I have the time to promote, but I’m short on the requisite treasure.)

There are relatively few rules that help writers communicate clearly, meaningfully, and artistically (see my series of posts about “The 7 Reasonable Rules of Writing,” beginning here: http://wp.me/p30cCH-E9 and here: http://wp.me/p30cCH-Gl or search my blog for keywords “art” “craft” and “rules”).

Writing is an Art. We may not know much about it, but we know what we like, and as your post pointed out, we’re not finding it.

Good bad book reviews. I certainly will not read those titles now. There is nothing worse that looking forward to a good read and finding it is a bust. I had looked forward to reading “The Night Circus”, and it just did not meet my expectations. It was the first novel of the writer, and it was written in a stilted style that just did not make me able to picture the scenes and the characters.

I read a lot of good books and I read a lot of “thoughtless” books that – because they are in series, so the main characters become familiar – don’t take as much attention. However, badly written books – like the ones you describe here – drive me crazy. Thanks for a great post!

It is so sad when good stories become bad books. Or when good writers write bad books. I have often been looking forward to reading books by authors whom I enjoy, only to have the books disappoint me. For example, John Irving’s recent books have disappointed me to the point that I have not been able to finish them. I truly enjoyed many of his other books.

I read a lot of book reviews and I’m astounding, not only by how poorly written many published books are, but by how much opinions of a book can differ from one person to the next. If it is a book I adored, there are bound to be many people (people who obviously have no taste) who hate it just as passionately. There have been books I’ve literally thrown across the room because I’ve thought them so horridly bad, yet when I read some of the reviews others have written, I have to question their sanity, or think that perhaps I actually read a different book than they did. I guess there is a book out there for everyone, but not every book is for everybody.

You have said exactly what I’ve encountered. I’m the most distressed when I hear people oohing and aahing over a book that I consider really poorly written. I mentally throw it across the room, then stomp on it and the author and the publisher. Then I check out what’s in the fridge.

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